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fish <https://fishshell.com/>__ - the friendly interactive shell |Build Status| |Cirrus CI|

fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, and the rest of the family. fish includes features like syntax highlighting, autosuggest-as-you-type, and fancy tab completions that just work, with no configuration required.

For downloads, screenshots and more, go to https://fishshell.com/.

Quick Start

fish generally works like other shells, like bash or zsh. A few important differences can be found at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html by searching for the magic phrase “unlike other shells”.

Detailed user documentation is available by running help within fish, and also at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html

Getting fish

macOS

fish can be installed:

-  using `Homebrew <http://brew.sh/>`__: ``brew install fish``
-  using `MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/>`__:
   ``sudo port install fish``
-  using the `installer from fishshell.com <https://fishshell.com/>`__
-  as a `standalone app from fishshell.com <https://fishshell.com/>`__

Note: The minimum supported macOS version is 10.10 "Yosemite".

Packages for Linux

Packages for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS are available from the openSUSE Build Service <https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=shells%3Afish&package=fish>__.

Packages for Ubuntu are available from the fish PPA <https://launchpad.net/~fish-shell/+archive/ubuntu/release-3>__, and can be installed using the following commands:

::

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-3 sudo apt update sudo apt install fish

Instructions for other distributions may be found at fishshell.com <https://fishshell.com>__.

Windows

-  On Windows 10/11, fish can be installed under the WSL Windows Subsystem
   for Linux with the instructions for the appropriate distribution
   listed above under “Packages for Linux”, or from source with the
   instructions below.
-  fish (4.0 on and onwards) cannot be installed in Cygwin, due to a lack of Rust support.

Building from source

If packages are not available for your platform, GPG-signed tarballs are available from fishshell.com <https://fishshell.com/>__ and fish-shell on GitHub <https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases>. See the Building <#building> section for instructions.

Running fish

Once installed, run fish from your current shell to try fish out!

Dependencies

Running fish requires:

-  A terminfo database, typically from curses or ncurses (preinstalled on most \*nix systems) - this needs to be the directory tree format, not the "hashed" database.
   If this is unavailable, fish uses an included xterm-256color definition.
-  some common \*nix system utilities (currently ``mktemp``), in
   addition to the basic POSIX utilities (``cat``, ``cut``, ``dirname``,
   ``file``, ``ls``, ``mkdir``, ``mkfifo``, ``rm``, ``sort``, ``tee``, ``tr``,
   ``uname`` and ``sed`` at least, but the full coreutils plus ``find`` and
   ``awk`` is preferred)
-  The gettext library, if compiled with
   translation support

The following optional features also have specific requirements:

-  builtin commands that have the ``--help`` option or print usage
   messages require ``nroff`` or ``mandoc`` for
   display
-  automated completion generation from manual pages requires Python 3.5+
-  the ``fish_config`` web configuration tool requires Python 3.5+ and a web browser
-  system clipboard integration (with the default Ctrl-V and Ctrl-X
   bindings) require either the ``xsel``, ``xclip``,
   ``wl-copy``/``wl-paste`` or ``pbcopy``/``pbpaste`` utilities
-  full completions for ``yarn`` and ``npm`` require the
   ``all-the-package-names`` NPM module
-  ``colorls`` is used, if installed, to add color when running ``ls`` on platforms
   that do not have color support (such as OpenBSD)

Building
--------

.. _dependencies-1:

Dependencies

Compiling fish requires:

• Rust (version 1.70 or later)
• CMake (version 3.5 or later)
• a C compiler (for system feature detection and the test helper binary)
• PCRE2 (headers and libraries) - optional, this will be downloaded if missing
• gettext (headers and libraries) - optional, for translation support
• an Internet connection, as other dependencies will be downloaded automatically

Sphinx is also optionally required to build the documentation from a cloned git repository.

Additionally, running the full test suite requires Python 3, tmux, and the pexpect package.

Building from source with CMake

To install into ``/usr/local``, run:

.. code:: bash

   mkdir build; cd build
   cmake ..
   make
   sudo make install

The install directory can be changed using the
``-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX`` parameter for ``cmake``.

CMake Build options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In addition to the normal CMake build options (like ``CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX``), fish's CMake build has some other options available to customize it.

- BUILD_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to build the documentation. This is automatically set to OFF when Sphinx isn't installed.
- INSTALL_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to install the docs. This is automatically set to on when BUILD_DOCS is or prebuilt documentation is available (like when building in-tree from a tarball).
- FISH_USE_SYSTEM_PCRE2=ON|OFF - whether to use an installed pcre2. This is normally autodetected.
- MAC_CODESIGN_ID=String|OFF - the codesign ID to use on Mac, or "OFF" to disable codesigning.
- WITH_GETTEXT=ON|OFF - whether to build with gettext support for translations.
- extra_functionsdir, extra_completionsdir and extra_confdir - to compile in an additional directory to be searched for functions, completions and configuration snippets

Building fish as self-installable (experimental)

You can also build fish as a self-installing binary.

This will include all the datafiles like the included functions or web configuration tool in the main fish binary, and you can unpack them to ~/.local/share/fish/install/ (currently, subject to change) by running fish --install (or fish --install=noconfirm to skip the confirmation).

You will have to use --install once per user and you will have to run it again when you upgrade fish. It will tell you to.

To install fish as self-installable, just use cargo, like:

.. code:: bash

cargo install --path /path/to/fish # if you have a git clone cargo install --git https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell --tag 4.0 # to build from git once 4.0 is released cargo install --git https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell # to build the current development snapshot without cloning

This will place the binaries in ~/.cargo/bin/, but you can place them wherever you want.

This build won't have the html docs (help will open the online version) or translations.

You can also link it statically (but not against glibc) and move it to other computers.

Contributing Changes to the Code

See the Guide for Developers <CONTRIBUTING.rst>__.

Contact Us

Questions, comments, rants and raves can be posted to the official fish mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users or join us on our matrix channel <https://matrix.to/#/#fish-shell:matrix.org>. Or use the fish tag on Unix & Linux Stackexchange <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fish>. There is also a fish tag on Stackoverflow, but it is typically a poor fit.

Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please open an issue <https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/new>__.

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